


See You When the Sun Sets East

by roebling



Category: Bandom, Panic At The Disco
Genre: Angst, Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-01
Updated: 2009-11-01
Packaged: 2017-10-23 03:12:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/245661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roebling/pseuds/roebling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ryan and Spencer have been friends for a long time. A story about the Panic split.</p>
            </blockquote>





	See You When the Sun Sets East

It's Monday and Ryan craves a fight, so he calls Brendon. He calls Brendon and he says, "Fuck you, I told you I'm not going to do the Blink tour. I'm not doing it!"

He clenches his teeth and he waits for Brendon's response, sharp and furious, but Brendon won't even give him that satisfaction.

Sighing, he says, "Ryan, don't be an asshole. Just think about it. It's only a month."

Then, the dial tone.

Brendon's business-brisk tone is ten times more infuriating than his words are. Ryan fumes in his bedroom, a silk scarf thrown over his bedside lamp for atmospheric effect. A quarter of a bottle of whiskey goes down burning and fills him with sparks and thunder. He dresses in a secondhand linen suit and goes out to a bar to drink Mai Tais garnished with flowers in the company of a half-rate talent with doe eyes and sunshine hair. He doesn't feel better but by the second or third drink he doesn't feel much of anything. They get dinner after and he feels a little like face planting in his plate of Penne with vodka sauce. He manages stays upright. Upright and zoned out, but that's nothing new.

In the morning, he wakes with a kink in his neck and a purple stain on his lapel. His dry cleaner sighs and shakes his head, because for all his chemical wizardry this is one he can't get out.

South Africa feels like a dream. Vegas feels like another life, long ago and far away down some dusty one-lane road. He doesn't remember how he got here, but he wouldn't go back for any amount of money.

Six days later he pulls out his chair and sits down across from Spencer and doesn't know what to say. He leaves his sunglasses on. It's a cheap restaurant, but it's neutral ground. There's no reason anyone either of them know would ever have come here before.

"How's everything?" Spencer asks. He drums his fingers on the table. He is tan and sharp, thinner than he was a month ago. He looks honed. His teeth gleam blue-white, but Ryan doesn't ask if he's had them bleached. He wants to, because he's been thinking of having his done, but someone told him it causes cancer or something. Spencer's eyes are toilet-cleaner blue. Ryan wonders if he's had those bleached, but that's a stupid question so he doesn't ask it. There are a lot of questions they don't ask each other; it used to be because there had been no need.

"Pretty good," Ryan says. "Y'know."

Spencer nods like he knows but Ryan doesn't think he understands. Spencer is learning how to surf. He lives with Brendon and Shane and the three of them watch videos on You-tube and smoke up in a back yard planted with yucca. That's not a life Ryan sees himself leading. He loves tension and he loves the frisson of passion. He decided a long time ago that he didn't care if he was fucked up because fucked up people are more interesting. In the back of his mind he thinks Pete's a little bit of a sell-out for falling prey to some dumb vixen peddling the oldest trick in the book, and he even kind of likes Ashlee. Still. Ryan feels calmest when he feels trapped. Things that never ripen to maturation never have a chance to rot.

"So," Spencer says. "You don't want to do the tour."

Ryan stares at the faux-marble finish of the table, at his water-spotted silverware, at the menu, greasy from hundreds of other thumbs and pointer fingers turning pages. Anywhere but at Spencer.

"I'm not going to do the tour," Ryan corrects him, and he has some vague idea about making an artistic stand, a regular Alamo of melody and verse, but this is Spencer. In eighth grade Ryan spent four solid months listening to Enema of the State on his little Sony Walkman. He listened from the time he left school in the afternoon until the time he fell asleep at night and sometimes also in the mornings while he poured himself bowls of Frosted Flakes. He burned through an eight pack of AA batteries a week. When that first copy wore out, Spencer went to Wal-Mart with his mom to buy Ryan a new one.

"You said that," Spencer says grumpily, and maybe it's taking too much credit but Ryan's always felt personally responsible for Spencer's nasty little mean streak. Without his guidance, Spencer would have been ... Well, it's a moot point, but Ryan's never minded being a formidable adversary, not for anyone but especially not for Spencer.

"I just," Ryan says. "I don't want to do it."

The waitress comes to take their order. A big chunk of her hair is bleached, and she's got a septum piercing. Ryan looks her over lazily, not really interested but at the same time annoyed that he's still got his sunglasses on and she can't see the interest in his gaze.

Spencer says, "I'll have tuna salad on rye, toasted, and he'll have a BLT, bacon crispy and mayo on the side, please." He smiles that neon smile he learned behind Ryan's back sometime and hands her back the menus. She purses her lips and writes their order.

"You could have asked what I wanted, ass," Ryan says, once their little waitress is kitchen-bound.

Spencer rolls his eyes. "Dude," he says. "Please."

Okay, he's got a point, because this is a ritual burnished bright with sanctity through repeat use. In hundreds of diners in dozens of states Ryan has let Spencer order him BLTs with crispy bacon and mayo on the side. There might have been a period of time in middle school when the prospect of interacting with any member of the human race made Ryan seize with terror. He froze up at the register in Barnes and Noble, mumbling and fumbling with his crumbled five dollar bills as he tried to pay for the latest copy of AP, the one with Sum 41 on the cover. The cashier was older, maybe in college even, and his hair was gelled. Ryan wasn't allowed to spike his. Odds were that the spiky-haired cashier possessed psychic powers and was thinking at that very moment, 'YOU ARE BUYING THIS MAGAZINE BECAUSE YOU THINK THE GUITAR PLAYER IS DREAMY. YOU WANT TO HANG HIS PICTURE IN YOUR LOCKER, YOU DEGENERATE'. Ryan's throat went tight; he couldn't face that kind of theoretical condemnation, not from a guy who had spiky hair. Nausea overwhelmed him and he fled.

He still wanted the magazine though, so he made Spencer go back with him the next day and pay for it. Spencer would go into the Rite-Aid and buy sanitary napkins for his mother; buying a dumb magazine was child's play.

The BLT thing began in that weird moment of extraordinary anxiety, before Ryan got the hang of pretending not to care so intensely that people believed he really didn't. It was easier back then to let his hair curtain his face and stare down at his lap and let Spencer do all the talking. That probably should have been some kind of a clue, because Spencer's always been willing to step up to the plate for him. When they got signed Ryan was pretty sure that Spencer out of all of them was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole, too soft and too young and too guileless to make it on tour. Come on, a pudgy virgin with spotty skin and a not-so-secret tendency to flush Kool-Aid red just when he ought to play it cool was an obvious liability. Later, he marveled at how quickly Spencer got caught up to speed. You've kept up with me, Ryan thought, secretly pleased as Spencer's jeans got tighter and his belly got flatter. Good for you.

It's pretty obvious now though that it was never Spencer who was out of sync.

"Hey. Hey!" Spencer says, snapping. Ryan looks up. Oh yeah. They're in sudden-death overtime here, and it's no time for reveries.

"Sorry," Ryan says, casually. "Late night."

It hadn't been. He drank a bottle of cheap red wine that tied his guts in knots and marathoned three discs of My So Called Life. He had been asleep by eleven o'clock.

"Okay," Spencer says. There are a lot of freckles on his nose, even though the florescent diner light washes him out. "So, seriously, you won't do the tour?"

Ryan sniffs. The air conditioner is turned up high; he's always cold anyway. "I won't," he says. "And Jon won't. Spence, we're writing an album. I mean, it ... it's written. We want to record."

Spencer makes an annoyed little noise but his face betrays nothing. "We've been writing too," he says. "We have stuff we were going to show you. I mean, me and Brendon have been working on these song for months ..."

"Yeah," Ryan says, derisive. "I'm sure Brendon is writing."

Spencer's face goes dark. "Don't go there, Ryan," he says.

Ryan rolls his eyes, because seriously, Brendon's always writing, but his idea of deep is a fucking cliche metaphor about a blow job. Salty waves, seriously. Brendon's not fooling anyone; he could be a virtuoso pianist and sing with the voice of an angel and he'd still have nothing much to say.

Ryan takes a deep breath. There's fire in his belly and he's wondering if he can do anything to make Spencer scream at him. Probably not; for all his glowering and gruff Spencer is awfully slow to anger. Haley broke up with him after three years, and yet still they talk on the phone every week. She emails him pictures of the dogs and he sends her boxes of her favorite French soap. Ryan would never, ever forgive anyone who left him. The insipid betrayals of high school girlfriends still make his blood boil.

"I just think we're ah ... doing something different than you guys are," he says. "Too different."

"Fine," Spencer says, too quickly. The corners of his mouth turn down. "Fine. This'll be easier I guess. So."

"Yeah," Ryan says, and suddenly it's so awkward. He's just been desperate for something new. He didn't mean ... He wanted to ... In his mind this conversation ended in fireworks.

The waitress hem-hems. The food is ready. Ryan sits up straight. She sloppily sets their plates down in front of them. Ryan methodically takes his sandwich apart, slathers the bread with an even coat of mayo, and puts it back together. Spencer cuts the halves of his sandwich into quarters. That's one of his weird things. The BLT is pretty good. The bacon is crispy enough, even if it does just taste like old grease.

"Good food," Ryan says between bites, and he cringes inside, because seriously is this is what he's been reduced to? Good food?

Spencer chews his tuna fish, methodical and opaque. "Hmmm," he says.

They've probably eaten lunch together a thousand times. Seventeen years since they met, and it's probably been a lot more than that. If Ryan closes his eyes he can picture himself in the kitchen in Spencer's old house, sitting in the chair with the wobbly leg, watching his mom water the aloe plant that grew over the sink as grilled cheese sandwiches sizzle on the stove.

"You guys can keep the name," Ryan says, suddenly, too hurried. He has to fight a tight sick feeling in his stomach. You guys can keep my band, is maybe what he means even though it was never his.

"You don't have to do that," Spencer says.

"No," Ryan says. "No, you should. I mean, we worked hard. It would be dumb to waste that."

"Right," Spencer says. "Okay."

Right.

Who's going to order him sandwiches when Spencer's not around? The one time Brendon tried it, Ryan punched him in the nose. For the rest of the night he walked around with a napkin shoved up his nostril to stanch the blood.

Anyway, it's not that he is unhappy, exactly.

Spencer shreds his napkin into little bits. They litter the table like dandruff.

"Tour's going to suck without you," he says, voice soft.

"Yeah," Ryan says. It won't. It's going to be amazing, but he knows what Spencer means.

Maybe this is what marriage would be like: three quarters of a lifetime and at the end, no words.

There are only crusts left on their plates. The waitress drops the check. Ryan goes to take out his wallet but Spencer beats him to it.

Outside, it's white-hot and the sky is khaki. LA is a death trap. Ryan loves it here.

Spencer futzes with his keys.

"So," he says.

"Yeah," says Ryan.


End file.
